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"It felt so homespun," Berg said about SXSW's shoestring beginnings. "Arguably it's the most important event of its type in the world."

The indie venture, modeled after the New Music Seminar in New York, was launched in 1987 by small-time band manager Roland Swenson, musician Louis Jay Meyers and music writers Louis Black and Nick Barbaro, who started the Austin Chronicle.

All appear on camera. Swenson, Black and Barbaro are still involved day to day. Meyers moved on in 1994.

"He referred to himself as the most hated man in the music business. It was his signature at the bottom of the letters that went to acts (that didn't get in)," Berg said. "There was a philosophical difference. He wanted to keep it kind of small."

But the film tells the story in a noisy, brash and not-always-flattering way. Growing pains led to fallout.

"It's hard for me to be objective about it," said SXSW co-founder Swenson, undoubtedly the festival's driving force. "Could I have imagined that it would have turned into what it has turned into? No. I did believe it could be a large and influential event if we could keep from screwing it up."

Swenson adds that Austin's reputation as a party town was "huge, even from the start."

"Nothing defines Austin in such a huge way," said Patoski, who has followed the ups and downs of the event from the beginning and is among the participants who tell the story on camera.

Co-founder Meyers agrees.

"You feel like the entire city is part of the event," said Meyers, who watched SXSW grow from a purely industry event to a destination for music fans, "a true average-Joe event."

That wasn't accidental.

From its inception, the Austin Chronicle touted every aspect of SXSW. So much so that it fell victim to a firebombing by the "SXSW Suxs" crowd, people who resented the festival for a variety of reasons as it started to grow.

But that media partner was critical.

"It helped having the Chronicle as one of the owners," Meyers said with a chuckle. "It was huge, huge, huge - just having that weekly coverage every week. Whatever we wanted to get through to the community, we had the ability to get it out there in a pretty heavy way.

"So much of it is about inclusion and getting all the camps of people thinking it's their event."